Baseball Fans Live for Heartbreak (and Hope)

Pitchers and catchers begin their workouts today — Valentine's Day — and it's time to let love back into your heart.

By
Britni de la Cretaz

Feb 14, 2018

Getty ImagesLothar Schulz

I can remember the exact moment when Derek Jeter broke my heart. He crushed it under the heel of his expensive shoes, stepped on it while swearing that it was for my own good. The day he made clear his intentions to dismantle the Miami Marlins, I swore I would never love again.

Hyperbole? I wish, but no.

Loving a sports team is very much like loving a person. There was an honest to goodness weight on my heart, pressing down pound after pound, when Jeter purchased my beloved Marlins and sold the players off one by one. He fired Jeff Conine, a legendary player known as Mr. Marlin, and even got rid of the poor guy who wore the Billy The Marlin mascot costume. The carnage seemed endless.

Even among die-hard baseball fans, it can be hard to explain how anyone can love the Marlins. We’re coming off our eighth consecutive losing season, we’re the laughing stock of the rest of baseball, and our stadium has the tackiest (read: most glorious) home run sculpture in all of baseball — something else Jeter wants to eliminate.

But falling for a baseball team is like having a partner you’ve vowed to support "in sickness and in health"; and sometimes that means loving them even through their life choices that seem baffling to you. It’s a challenging relationship, because it’s not just about one man — it’s about 40.

Happiness is baseball season, every single year.

When you fall hard for a team, it’s almost always the players who’ve ultimately ensnared you. Maybe you fall for Giancarlo Stanton’s hot body and sexy ass swing. Or maybe it’s Dee Gordon’s quick smile, and even faster sprints on the basepaths. Perhaps it’s Justin Bour’s affinity for Selena Gomez songs, or Marcell Ozuna’s quiet ability to always be better than anyone gives him credit for. It’s equal parts shallow (but unapologetic) beauty, brains, and personality; just like any relationship. And that’s why Marlins fans are throwing darts at photos of Derek Jeter in our rooms right now. He’s dismantled the essential parts that make up our life partner. We’re all nursing broken hearts, and not for the first time.

It was 1997 the first time someone ripped Marlins fans’ hearts out of our chests. Wayne Huizenga, the Marlins' first owner, started the team in 1993 and had a wild theory that more people would come to the ballpark if the club actually won games. So he went out and spent more money on free agents (players who are not under contract with any specific team and can sign wherever they want) than anyone ever had before, and won Miami a World Series for his efforts. We were jubilant.

Then, 11 days later, he began dismantling the entire team. We watched the players who made our city champions for the first time get sold off like worthless junk. It was as if someone took my prized possessions and packed them up in a box and set them on the side of the road for the garbage truck to take away.

It’s not just about one man — it’s about 40.

Baseball broke my heart again in 2003. I'd moved north to attend college in Boston. The city was a new home, but the Red Sox weren’t an entirely new team. My grandfather was from Boston and like a true Sox fan, he’d taught me to yell, "Yankees suck!" when I was a little girl — well before the Marlins even existed. And so, in 2003 it was Game 7 of the American League Championship Series between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees and Aaron-fucking-Boone hit a walk-off home run to send the Yankees to the World Series. With one swing of the bat, the unlikeliest of players had crushed the hopes of a fanbase who had been waiting 85 years for a championship.

Aaron Boone sent me spiraling through all the stages of grief — shock, sadness, anger. That ‘03 loss felt like getting over being dumped by a first love. I walked around the city in a daze. The rest of the city seemed to be in the same fog; it was a mass mourning for a team that hadn’t won a World Series in over eight decades. It was like no one could believe it had really happened. I cried randomly — on the train, at work, in coffee shops — for over a week, deeply feeling the words of former baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti. "Baseball," he said, "is designed to break your heart."

“The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

But what Giamatti forgot to mention is that baseball also pieces my heart back together every spring. When I approach the field in March and see the green outfield, the red diamond, and the white bases like marshmallows at each corner; when the scent of grass and dirt hit my nose? It all sparks joy, as Marie Kondo might say. I think about how aptly named the field is — a sparkling jewel, a shiny diamond gleaming in the summer sun. Happiness is baseball season, every single year. Spring training is the first sign of life, an indicator that we’re coming out of the cold, dark winter no matter what the groundhog said.

When you fall hard for a team, it’s almost always the players who’ve ultimately ensnared you.

Maybe I’m a masochist, or a glutton for punishment. Or maybe, I’m just a hopeless romantic who is a sucker for the feeling of finding new love, who keeps coming back for more because I believe that one day I’ll find that Special Team that will love me right back. When a relationship ends, it doesn’t erase the good times you had or the love you once felt. Similarly, when teams part ways with the players you’ve grown to cherish, you don’t have to lose the joy they brought you. Those emotions are still real. And even though it hurts to watch them find happiness with someone else, to really, truly love someone is to let them go and celebrate their success — even if it isn’t with you.

And so today, as pitchers and catchers are reporting to spring training and couples around the country scour the shelves for flowers and chocolate, I’m ready — excited even — to let love back into my heart. I’ll cherish what Giancarlo Stanton brought to the Marlins and wish him well on the evil New York Yankees. I’ll be grateful that Marcell Ozuna is in a bigger baseball market in St. Louis, where he can finally get the attention he deserves. I’ll scrape what I can from the bottom of Derek Jeter’s shoe, and find new, young players to adore when they take the field in Marlins Park. Sometimes love hurts, but that doesn’t mean you should ever let it go.

Britni de la Cretaz is a Boston based news and sports writer whose work has been featured on Vogue, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, VICE Sports, espnW, Marie Claire, Buzzfeed, NYLON, and more.

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